The effects of anxiety and intelligence on concept formation

The goals of this study were to investigate the effects of anxiety and intelligence
upon proficiency in concept formation, On the basis of an extension of Spence’s theory
of anxiety and performance to incorporate intelligence as a variable, it was predicted
that anxiety and intelligence would have interactive effects on proficiency in concept
formation. This expectation was based on the assumptions that the effects of anxiety
on proficiency would interact with those of task difficulty, and that task difficulty
was a function of the intelligence of the subject as well as the intrinsic complexity
of a task. Specifically, It was expected that if task complexity was held constant,
higher levels of anxiety would facilitate concept formation for high Intelligence
subjects and impair concept formation for low intelligence subjects.
The subjects were 56 male students enrolled in introductory psychology who scored
in the extreme quartiles on the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale. The high and low anxiety
groups were each divided into high and low intelligence groups by splitting them at
the median intelligence score for the total group. This procedure yielded four experimental
groups designated HiA-HiIQ, LoA-’HiIQ, HiA-LoIQ, and LoA-LoIQ. All subjects were given
two concept formation tasks, derived from those developed by Bruner, and required
to deduce the attributes which constituted the concept from information provided as
follows: the attributes included in the concept were deducible primarily by comparing
negative instances of the concept to an initial positive instance, whereas the attributes
not included in the concept were deducible by comparing positive instances to the
initial positive instance. The necessary information was provided within the first
nine instances; four additional redundant instances were given.
After the subjects had examined each instance, they were required to report their
conclusions about the concept by recording either 1) that they knew the attribute
was included in the concept (I), or 2) that they knew the attribute was not included
(N), or 3) that they did not know whether the attribute was or was not included (?).
The subjects’ reports were scored correct or erroneous by comparing them to the report
that could be correctly deduced from the information given by the instances presented.
The results for correct r snorts of knowledge of attribute inclusion showed that,
as predicted, anxiety facilitated the concept formation proficiency of high intelligence
subjects, and interfered with the concept formation proficiency of low intelligence
subjects. This finding was explicated by examining the subjects’ erroneous reports,
erroneous reports were divided into six error types depending upon the report made
by the subject as compared to the report that co Id be correctly deduced. Interactive
effects of anxiety and intelligence were found only for those types of erroneous reports
in which the information given established that an attribute either was (I) or was
not (N) included in the concert but the subject made the wrong one of these two reports.
The fact that this effect was found for only this kind of error was interpreted to
be consistent with the extended theory of anxiety and performance.
Additional findings showed that high intelligence subjects and low intelligence subjects
tended to make different types of errors in concept formation. For the first task
only, high intelligence subjects made more erroneous reports than did low intelligence
subjects of the type in which they reported that they did not know about the inclusion
of an attribute in the concept(?), when they could have deduced that it was included
(I). Low
intelligence subjects made many more errors than high intelligence subjects of the
type in which they reported that an attribute was included in the concept (I), when
the information had not established whether or not it was included (?).

Description

This thesis was digitized as part of a project begun in 2014 to increase the number
of Duke psychology theses available online. The digitization project was spearheaded
by Ciara Healy.